Will Trump Actually Go To Prison?

 

Most people say they would rather see Trump in prison that dead or in exile. Personally, I like the prison option too. There have, of course, been heads of state who have been executed, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette come to mind, as do Charles I of England, Mary Queen of Scots, Nicholas II of Russia, Mussolini, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania. Ion Antonescu pf Romania, Haile Selassie, Saddam Hussein, Vidkun Quisling of Norway. Philippe Pétain (although his death sentence was commuted to life in prison). There were dozens of heads of state that were imprisoned, Trump's pals Silvio Berlusconi and Hosni Mubarak being two. Crooked right wing French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Prime Minister, François Fillon, ran France from 2007 until 2012 and were both arrested in 2017. I think Sarkozy got off but Fillon may still in prison. Panamanian President Manuel Noriega was kidnapped and thrown into an American prison until he died.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was imprisoned for treason for a couple years, then went into exile and was quickly pardoned by Andrew Johnson. I guess that would be the closest we come to Señor Trumpanzee.

Yesterday Forward reporter PJ Grisor asked Could Trump become the first president to flee America since Lindbergh? Obviously he was referring to Phil Roth's novel, The Plot Against America in which the fascist who beat FDR, Charles Lindbergh, flew his own plane from Louisville to DC but disappeared enroute.

While the HBO adaptation of Roth’s novel indicates that Lindbergh actually crashed-- his radar jammed by British intelligence and a group of American-Jewish patriots-- show creators David Simon and Ed Burns preserved an alternative view of what became of the 33rd president. As in the book, the revelation comes courtesy of the character of Evelyn (Winona Ryder).

Evelyn is the wife of a Lindbergh administration insider, and evidently someone capable of believing the QAnon theory that JFK Jr. faked his death by plane crash. She tells her sister, Bess that Lindbergh didn’t actually die. Rather, Hitler’s people kidnapped the beloved airmail pilot’s son, Charles, Jr., a year before the Nazis came to power and raised him as a member of the Hitler Youth.

Using the son as leverage, the Reich then dictated Lindbergh’s actions as an isolationist president-- including his hostile policies towards American Jewry.

Berlin wasn’t pleased with Lindbergh’s first-term job, and so ordered him to stage his disappearance so his vice president, Burton K. Wheeler, a more committed antisemite, could take control and implement the plans von Ribbentrop laid out for persecuting Jews. While it’s never explicitly said where Lindbergh ended up, given the Nazi blackmail plot, we can only assume he was recalled to Berlin.

With rumors swirling about a Trump resignation, speculation that the president’s foreign policy is dictated by kompromat and the QAnon conceit that Trump and a parade of notable people-- some of whom are dead-- are out to save children from a Democratic blood-youth pedophile cabal, the Roth scenario, crazy as it is, now certainly sounds more plausible.

The fear that Trump might skip town, leaving Pence in charge of a well-oiled oppressive state-- if one that’s more Handmaid’s Tale than Man in the High Castle-- also follows a certain trend of left-wing alarmism that matches what goes on in Plot.

But we probably shouldn’t worry too much about Trump’s threat, given the undesired diplomatic consequences any host country would endure as a result of his indefinite stay there as a man on the lam. It’s also tough to imagine Trump surviving in a country where English isn’t the dominant language or where his preferred McDonald’s menu items might be adulterated with flavors more exotic than trans fats and ketchup.

More concerning-- and imminently more likely-- is the warning present in the finale of HBO’s Plot adaptation. In the closing moments, set during an unprecedented election, we see voter intimidation, names of people of color missing from the rolls and men in suits carting off ballots and burning them en masse.

Some conspiracy theories have a bit more merit to them.

Jon Schwarz noted at The Intercept that Losing Could Expose Trump To Prosecution For Any Number Of Crimes. "Former presidents," he wrote, "normally don't go to jail, but few have committed so many obvious crimes unrelated to their duties in office." BUT "no former U.S. president has ever seen the inside of a cell-- and not because all presidents have faithfully followed the law. Presidents accumulate huge favors owed, favors that they cash in, figuratively and literally, when they become former presidents... [E]x-presidents receive political protection from their allies, as when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for anything whatsoever he’d done in office. And beyond anything concrete that a president does for the factions that back him, those factions also strenuously oppose any consequences for their president’s actions for reasons of basic class solidarity. If an ex-president can face consequences, that would suggest that people one step down the power ladder could too. And the people at the top of U.S. society see consequences like Leona Helmsley saw taxes: They’re for the little people."

Trump is more vulnerable to prosecution than other presidents because he’s engaged in so many potential nontraditional presidential crimes. With the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush committed what the Nuremberg trials referred to as “the supreme international crime” of initiating a war of aggression. But there was never any chance that he’d be punished for this, because the entire U.S. power structure agrees that American presidents have the right to do it. Same for conducting thousands of drone strikes or torturing people around the globe. By contrast, Trump has engaged in many comparatively small, shabby, possible criminal activities outside of his presidential duties.

Right now, Trump is protected from indictment under all federal laws because he’s president. For decades, the Justice Department has held that it cannot prosecute sitting presidents; former special counsel Robert Mueller agreed and explained that he never had the option to charge Trump because it would be unconstitutional. And, whether or not this perspective is correct, Attorney General William Barr is a loyal hatchet man who would never take action against his patron.

It does seem, according to a recent Supreme Court ruling, that Trump could theoretically be indicted for violating state laws while in office. In practice, however, that is extremely unlikely.

But if Trump is defeated and extracted from the Oval Office, much of his presidential shield will disintegrate. He could try to pardon himself on the way out the door for all crimes he’s ever committed. But no one knows whether presidents can do this, since none have ever tried; in any case, it would only apply to violations of the federal code.

So let’s assume that Trump loses, he doesn’t pardon himself, and the state and federal justice systems suddenly become enthused like never before about treating the ultra-powerful like the powerless. Trump would then become vulnerable to prosecution in the below ways we already know about-- plus, in all likelihood, many, many others we don’t know about yet.

The crimes? Tax fraud, bank and insurance fraud, campaign finance violations, bribery, negligent homicide (in terms of the pandemic), and obstruction of justice. Schwarz reminds his readers that "After Mueller’s report was released, over 1,000 former federal prosecutors stated that if Trump were not president, his conduct as described by Mueller would 'result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.' It’s hard to imagine a Biden administration deciding to prosecute a former president. But, on the other hand, Kamala Harris said in 2019 that if she were elected president, 'I believe that [the Justice Department] would have no choice and that they should' pursue obstruction of justice charges against Trump." No mention of treason?

It certainly would have happened if Bernie were elected president but it's pretty much unimaginable it will happen under Biden/Pelosi/Schumer. It didn't take me long to figure out who to ask for a second opinion. I don't know that many people with brilliant legal minds. So I asked Alan Grayson, who possesses one. "I doubt that the next Attorney General will have the backbone to investigate any of his Presidential crimes," he told me, "but all of his run-of-the-mill tax fraud, banking fraud, etc., will work its way through the system. He probably will try to pardon himself from federal crimes before he leaves office, but that won’t even slow down any New York prosecutions, and New York has a very sophisticated financial crimes operation."

Herd Immunity by Chip Proser